Hard Lessons Learned After Exiting Daily Operations And What Came Next (Justin Currie)

He grew the business impressively for five years, exited daily operations, and then things didn’t go as planned. Justin Currie, CEO of Thema Home Care opens up about what happened after he stepped away, the people and process issues he discovered, and how he ultimately tuned the business around. He gets detailed and prescriptive on people in the wrong seats, processes not being followed, hard decisions and conversations he had to have, and the results of re-engaging in daily operations. He also shares an exciting update about partnering with the American Health at Home fund to expand his business and open new doors for accelerated growth.

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min

Jan 6, 2026

Hard Lessons Learned After Exiting Daily Operations And What Came Next (Justin Currie)

Miriam Allred (00:11)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. I hope everyone's having an awesome week. It's great to be back with you. Today in the lab, I am joined by Justin Curry, the founder and CEO of FEMA Home Care. Justin, welcome to the lab.

Justin Currie (00:25)
Yes, thanks Miriam. I'm happy to be back. I'm surprised you had me back, but I'm grateful for it because I'm excited to be here.

Miriam Allred (00:31)
Surprised I had you back. Yeah, right. I have been looking forward to having you on this show. You have been on previous podcasts and it's you're long overdue to be on the show. You know, I'm coming up on eight or nine months at this point and so better late than never. You and I were just talking about it's great to reconnect. You have had a really interesting couple of years actually and that's what I want to unpack today. So some people listening to this may not know you or may not know your story. So backtrack to kind of pre-home care, starting your business, give us a little highlight reel of your last few years.

Justin Currie (01:03)
Sure, absolutely. So basically how I kind of started out, so I owned an inspection business up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and that's where I'm from originally, is Saskatchewan, Canada. And so owning that business, actually, I'll give you kind of the brief overview of how I got down here in the first place, but owning that business, I actually met my now fiance, who is from just outside of Philadelphia, and we were long distance for a couple years, but I started learning more and more about the home care industry during that time period because my grandmother actually became ill. And with her being ill, I was kind of in and out. I wasn't local to where she was at, but I would travel back and forth. But I was also very involved in helping find care for her. And, you know, being in a really, really small town, that was really challenging. We only have about 500 people in my town. So that, that, you know, brought up a whole nother slew of problems and obstacles to kind of get around. But ultimately we were able to find her care and she eventually went and moved into the nursing home and eventually passed from there. But that time period was about probably about four to five years from all that happening. So I really learned a lot about it. And as I met my fiance down here, I started looking at different opportunities and different growth industries down outside of Philadelphia. And obviously this is national, international.

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⁓ But learning more about the industry, I realized that I could put kind of my business knowledge and skills to work in an industry where I could also help people. know, in my inspection business in Canada, you know, I help people but I wasn't changing anyone's life, So it was a really good opportunity for me to obviously, we decided I was going to move down just outside of Philadelphia with my fiance and so with that I decided to start a home care agency and that's because I can combine my love of business with helping others as well. So it was just kind of a win-win situation and that's how I found myself here and when I started the agency, I believe

that was in 2018 now. I started the agency and I was actually immigrating at the same time. I'm on a visa and I always kind of joke with everybody that actually starting the agency was much easier than the immigration process. ⁓ that's kind of what brought me down here and it's been yeah it's been a really exciting I guess seven, I'm going on eight years now.

Miriam Allred (03:16)
Amazing. I was just going to ask what year this was because this was pre-pandemic, correct?

Justin Currie (03:29)
It was, yeah, we kind of just started, we just got some traction going and then we hit the pandemic immediately, so.

Miriam Allred (03:36)
I know and you're like, wow, what a time to be in home care and in the US all at once. ⁓ So seven or eight years, just briefly kind of overview like growth and like evolution of the business from then to now, just like numbers roster, just some of the high points, like payer sources, just give us kind of like landscape of the business the last few years.

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Justin Currie (03:39)
Sure, sure. So starting out, know, we were like a lot of agencies, right? We were everything to everyone, right? We were Medicaid, we were VA, we were private pay. we didn't want to kind of niche down on any opportunities. And I'm glad we did it that way to start out, but it wasn't any way we could really scale. So over the years, we saw a lot of problems with Medicaid, especially in PA with reimbursement rates. I know reimbursement rates for Medicaid, they're pretty decent in some other states. In PA, they're really not.

It makes it, you next to impossible to work with, unfortunately. And so we ended up kind of pivoting and moving away from that model. And what we did was we, you if anyone's heard my previous podcast or anything like that is we really specialize in private pay. We went all in on higher end private pay. So we were charging a lot more than other agencies. We still do charge a lot more than other agencies, but we increased our level of quality. So the level, the quality of care went way, way up, but also it helped us kind of control our growth. So when your rates are a little bit higher like that, you can control the volume that's coming in. And with a staffing crisis, that's pretty imperative because we never really had any issues with finding new staff just because we can control the volume of clients coming in. So we operate a little bit lower volume, a higher margin ⁓ type of model, and it's served us really, really well.

you know, kind of fast forward to COVID, we ran into some challenges. We actually still grew a little bit through COVID. It was the year after that was the only year where we went down a little bit in revenue. And that was, ⁓ I call it like the unemployment crisis. They were paying everybody to stay at home on unemployment insurance. So it made it really challenging to bring people in. And that was in and ever since then, it's kind of the trajectory has been, just up, up, up. And it's been a really exciting time.

And kind of fast forward to today is we do a lot of private pay, we do a lot of VA and a lot of long-term care insurance and it's a relatively split mix amongst those three things but that's where our focus and our target is right now.

Miriam Allred (06:07)
Okay, so you really have just cut out Medicaid. I was going to ask when you first started a lot of startup early stage businesses, listen to this, was it just purely client demand and that's why you started across payer sources or had you heard things from other operators? Why did you start in all payer sources?

Justin Currie (06:24)
It was really challenging. The Medicaid model and I think other things, I know we have a local area on aging that's local that actually provides some hours of care for seniors. Those entities are really, really difficult to work with. With Medicaid, there's a ton of billing complexities that come with it. There's compliance issues. The first year that we worked with Medicaid, we had to pay back about $30,000 in claims just because our paperwork wasn't

I was spending my time, I was out in the field marketing, working on other things and I kind of had the choice at that point of whether I wanted to jump back in and really learn about Medicaid and figure out all the billing complexities or else kind of eliminate it completely and move forward with this higher margin home care. And so ultimately that's what I decided to do but any advice that I would give to new owners is just to know your numbers. I have a lot of agency owners that come to me and

and they want to sign up for Medicaid, they want to sign up for VA, they want to do all these things. And whenever I ask them what the reimbursement rate of those payers is, they don't know. I don't think I've ever had one that's been able to tell me what the reimbursement rate is. So whatever you're doing, it doesn't matter what state, what payer sources you're using, just know your numbers. If the numbers make sense, then that's a possible payer source for you. If they don't, then you need to focus on the ones that do provide that margin.

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